How it began
The Cypriot syllabary was used in Iron Age Cyprus, on the territory of the present-day country, from about the 11th century BCE according to one account and from the 9th century BCE according to another. It is thought to descend from the Cypro-Minoan syllabary of the island's Bronze Age, itself a variant or derivative of Linear A. The Aegean origin of the script has been recognized since the end of the 19th century, following Arthur Evans's studies of Cypro-Minoan, which is described as its direct ancestor.
How it works
The script has 56 signs. Each sign generally stands for an open syllable, a consonant followed by a vowel such as ka, ke, ki, ko or ku. It was usually written from right to left. Scholars divide it into two regional forms, the Common syllabary and the southwestern or Paphian one. Most texts are in the Arcadocypriot dialect of Greek, which reached Cyprus at the end of the second millennium BCE. Others are in a local language called Eteocypriot, probably pre-Greek, as in the bilingual inscription from Amathus.
Who pushed back
The syllabary held out against the Greek alphabet for a long time. King Evagoras of Salamis is named as a pioneer of the change to the alphabet. Use of the syllabary began to decay in the second half of the 4th century BCE and it disappeared during the Hellenistic period. It has been suggested that it survived in some use as late as the 1st century BCE.
What lasted
Decipherment was not the work of one scholar. George Smith made the first attempt in 1871, starting from a bilingual text from Idalion. The Egyptologist Samuel Birch improved it in 1872, the numismatist Johannes Brandis followed in 1873, the philologists Moriz Schmidt, Wilhelm Deecke and Justus Siegismund in 1874, and H. L. Ahrens in 1876. Reading the syllabary showed that Greek had been written on Cyprus in a non-alphabetic script and preserved a record of the Arcadocypriot dialect.
Where it stands today
The inscriptions are studied as a main source for the language and history of the Cypriot city kingdoms, and the unread Eteocypriot texts remain a research problem. The script was added to the Unicode Standard in April 2003 with version 4.0, in the block U+10800 to U+1083F, so its signs can be encoded in digital text.
